October 22, 2021 By Derek Royden
The 🦖👿 persecution of Steven Donziger
SNIPPETS:
“
I have been attacked and demonized for years by Chevron in retaliation for helping Indigenous peoples in Ecuador try to do something to save their cultures, their lives, and our planet in the face of massive oil pollution. That’s the context for why we are here today,” Donziger told the court after his sentencing this month.
The United States District Judge who sentenced Donziger, 🦖
Loretta Preska is a leader of the
🐘 rightwing Federalist Society in New York state, which receives financial support from Chevron. The group is dedicated to putting right wing judges on the bench and the support of companies like
🦖 Chevron ensures that those elevated by the group will put the interests of big business before the interests of ordinary people like those in Ecuador still suffering the consequences of the corporation’s plunder of their resources.
As reported by Branko Marketic in Jacobin, this is far from the first time that Preska has had a seeming conflict of interest in a case she presided over. In 2012 she was the judge in the trial of Jeremy Hammond, who was accused of hacking the private security company Stratfor, among other targets. Despite her husband being a Stratfor client whose data was hacked, Preska refused to recuse herself from the case. She sentenced Hammond to 10 years after having him held in pretrial detention during the year-long trial.
It has also been proven that Lewis Kaplan had investments in Chevron through mutual funds, as shown by financial disclosure forms.
It should be noted that Donziger’s story has been covered in a much different way in much of the business press, with one story in Forbes Magazine I found ignoring Guerra’s admissions and concluding
Donziger was little more than a shakedown artist rather than a
tireless human rights lawyer seeking to redress inexcusable negligence of and injustice created by a 🦖👿 faceless corporate entity. ... ...
The influence
🦖👿 Chevron has been able to wield over U.S. courts in their scorched earth campaign against Donziger is a worrying sign on many fronts. In terms of climate change, it begs the question: If a fossil fuel company can’t be held to account for the very obvious harms they’ve deliberately caused in the past, what chance does the environmental movement and civil society generally have to rein them in and prevent even greater, globalized catastrophes in the future?
Full article:
https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/10/22/the-persecution-of-steven-donziger/Jim K
One of the aspects of this case, not in the article, is that when 🐍 Judge Kaplan (a former tobacco lawyer) brought the criminal contempt charge against Mr Donziger, the US Attorney/DOJ refused to prosecute the case (official reason was they "didn't have the manpower"), so Judge Kaplan assigned a law firm (that had Chevron as a client) to be 🐍 special prosecutors for the case.
Also, 🐍 Judge Preska was assigned to hear the case, not through the normal random rotation, but specifically chosen by Judge Kaplan. Neither Judge Kaplan (in the RICO case) nor Judge Preska (in the contempt case) allowed the case to be tried by a jury; in fact the prosecutors and Judge Preska agreed to making the maximum sentence for the contempt charge to be no more than 6-months, because if it had been more than that, a jury trial would have been required.
Historically, the largest sentence for an attorney convicted of criminal contempt of court has been 90-day of home monitoring (house arrest). Steven Donziger has now spent over two-years under ankle-bracelet home monitoring (787-days on the day of his sentencing on October 1st) and remains confined to his apartment while he's appealing Judge Preska's 👿 ruling not to allow him out on bail while the appeal of his contempt conviction is pending.
agelbert > Jim K👍 Thank you for that important information.
🗽 Steven Donziger ✨ is a man of integrity.Big 🦖 Oil has been 😈 corrupting US Government foreign policy AND the Judiciary system for more than a century. We all need to recognize that
Mens rea is their practiced Social Darwinist Criminal modus operandi.
They cannot be reformed.If we do not Bankrupt Big Oil out of business so they can no longer corrupt our government, we are Catastrophic Climate Change toast. 🥺